Introduction

Hemlock is a poison used to kill prisoners to kings, from Ancient through Medieval Times, whose most famous victim happened to be Socrates. Hemlock affects the body’s central nervous system by causing muscle paralysis and, eventually, paralysis of the respiratory muscles, therefore causing death by suffocation.

The newest ATI Radeon 5000 series video card, the Dual Graphics Processor the ATI Radeon HD5970, is codenamed Hemlock and it is the most powerful video card produced to date.  The ATI 5970 with its dual graphics processors is also the first dual graphics processor video card to support DirectX 11, which is a software component of the new Windows 7 operating system.

Sapphire Technologies, a manufacturer of ATI Radeon Video cards, has produced an HD5970 that also comes out of the box with a slight overclock. The Sapphire Radeon HD5970 has a clock speed of 735 MHz per processor and a total of 2048 MB of memory. With the Compute power of 4.64 TeraFLOPs and 3200 streaming processors, you may think that the Sapphire Radeon HD5970 is a power hog, but due to active cycling when idle, it only consumes 42Watts of power and a max of 294W at load.

Sapphire Technologies has been a leader in manufacturing ATI Graphics boards and they are also a key world wide supplier. Within the last three years, Sapphire has also began to manufacture system mainboards and one of their most recent is based on the AMD 785G chipset.